More changes at Chef, as another head of sales is leaving the company

Chef’s Ken Cheney, who stepped in to run the Seattle DevOps startup’s sales organization in June after the departure of its leader, has left the company amid other changes in Chef’s sales group.

Cheney, whose biography disappeared from Chef’s site this week, is taking a similar position with Qumulo, GeekWire has learned. Chef confirmed that Cheney, who first joined Chef in 2013 in July 2013 as vice president of business development and product marketing, has left the company.

Ken Cheney, former chief revenue office at Chef. (Chef Photo)

“Chef is grateful for his contributions during the past few years,” the company said in a statement. A Qumulo representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s just the latest round of changes at the top for Pioneer Square-based Chef, which has raised $103 million to build automated developer tools for software organizations. CEO Barry Crist reorganized the engineering department in June, giving control of the group back to Chef co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Adam Jacob. That was also when Cheney took over as chief revenue officer amid the departure of Tucker Callaway, who is now the chief revenue officer at Sauce Labs in the Bay Area.

According to a source, Emily Speer Ryan, who ran Chef’s customer operations group, is pursuing a new role within the company, and Michele Todd, who managed its relationship with Microsoft, is leaving the company. Chef declined to comment on those moves.

Chef’s products help companies build and deploy software more efficiently, and it can be used in public clouds or on-premises data centers. After raising $40 million in 2015, Chef laid off “a small number” of employees in 2016 citing the need to “streamline” operations.

(Editor’s note: This post was updated to correct the spelling of Michele Todd’s name.)

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Tom Krazit, GeekWire's Cloud & Enterprise Editor, covered technology for news organizations including IDG, CNET, and paidContent before serving as executive editor of Gigaom and the Structure conference series. Reach him at tom@geekwire.com and follow him @tomkrazit.